Once St. Augustine had succeeded in slaking his lust for the prostitutes of Rome, he demonized women and sex to a degree that far surpassed anything the Catholic Church had ever concerned itself with, at least up until that point.
Augustine, in other words, was as fanatic a voice for the oppression and vilification of women and sex in his own time, as the Taliban or ISIS are today, even though the Catholic Church had never taken such an extremist view of either one during the days of St. Augustine.
Today, the Catholic Church largely bases its entire understanding, which is as medieval an understanding about sexuality as geo-centrism was of our solar system, on the writings of men like St. Augustine, who not only seemed to take more pleasure in excoriating women than the Marquee de Sade, but who likewise enjoyed and lauded the use of torture to convert people to his own virulent brand of Catholicism, which was as steeped in its fear of women and hatred of human flesh as was alleged of Satan himself.
That our consumerist economy now exploits our sexual instincts to sell everything and anything, is exploited in turn by modern day religious fanatics, who all point to just how right St. Augustine was, even though it was St. Augustine's vitriolic polemics agaisnt both sex and women that only served to objectify women as "evil" incarnate in the first place.
Of course, every good Catholic knows it is their god-fearing duty to deny such facts, lest they burn in hell as much as St. Augustine's loins no doubt burned for a return to the pleasures of Eden he found no where as much as in the brothels of Rome.
Those "good Catholics" also know it is their duty to everywhere denounce pornography as simply an objectification of women, which it clearly is to some degree, even as they know they must likewise everywhere deny that their own religion, like virtually all religions, does exactly the same thing, but in a far more subtle and manipulative way.
In both pornography and religion, people are reduced to simply means, not ends, which is essentially the same thing finance and economics does to people, turning each of us into simply a means of achieving something else, whether that "something else" is sexual gratification, salvation, wealth or growth, respectively, and so on.
While consumerism, pornography, banking and virtually every ism there is under the sun, all use people as the means by which they advance their own agendas, religion objectifies them doubly, by first casting humanity as broken by "original sin," and then by using humanity as the "means" by which the faithful obtain their salvation.
Such an idea conjures up images from a zombie movie, as if Christians would literally crawl over mounds of people, using them as mere rungs on their spiritual ladder, just to avoid hell and reach heaven. In fact, that's exactly what we saw in Viet Nam and Cambodia, with Americans clamoring onto helicopters even as they kicked people back into the "hell" America had helped to create, and was now leaving behind.
In this way, even our most altruistic endeavors are always, at bottom, mere exercises in self interest, since religion teaches us to "love our fellow man," even if we don't really want to, because it is only by doing so that we win eternal heaven and avoid eternal hell. Who, then, without such a bribe and a threat, would bother to love anyone but themselves, in a world run by the "love of money" and an economic ethos of survival of the fittest?
In such a world, what Catholic priest would die for an atheist, were it not for the hope of heaven and the dread of hell? Would Phil Robertson ever think to die for a homosexual, for anything less than an eternal reward for doing so, and the avoidance of eternal damnation? What arch Conservatives would ever dare to forsake their own sacred political views for those evil Liberals, and what arch Liberal would ever dare to do the same for a Conservative, but for the hope of avoiding hell and winning heaven?
It is in just such a world that our morality is determined by fashioning everyone as a means to our own ends, and nothing more.
Augustine, in other words, was as fanatic a voice for the oppression and vilification of women and sex in his own time, as the Taliban or ISIS are today, even though the Catholic Church had never taken such an extremist view of either one during the days of St. Augustine.
Today, the Catholic Church largely bases its entire understanding, which is as medieval an understanding about sexuality as geo-centrism was of our solar system, on the writings of men like St. Augustine, who not only seemed to take more pleasure in excoriating women than the Marquee de Sade, but who likewise enjoyed and lauded the use of torture to convert people to his own virulent brand of Catholicism, which was as steeped in its fear of women and hatred of human flesh as was alleged of Satan himself.
That our consumerist economy now exploits our sexual instincts to sell everything and anything, is exploited in turn by modern day religious fanatics, who all point to just how right St. Augustine was, even though it was St. Augustine's vitriolic polemics agaisnt both sex and women that only served to objectify women as "evil" incarnate in the first place.
Of course, every good Catholic knows it is their god-fearing duty to deny such facts, lest they burn in hell as much as St. Augustine's loins no doubt burned for a return to the pleasures of Eden he found no where as much as in the brothels of Rome.
Those "good Catholics" also know it is their duty to everywhere denounce pornography as simply an objectification of women, which it clearly is to some degree, even as they know they must likewise everywhere deny that their own religion, like virtually all religions, does exactly the same thing, but in a far more subtle and manipulative way.
In both pornography and religion, people are reduced to simply means, not ends, which is essentially the same thing finance and economics does to people, turning each of us into simply a means of achieving something else, whether that "something else" is sexual gratification, salvation, wealth or growth, respectively, and so on.
While consumerism, pornography, banking and virtually every ism there is under the sun, all use people as the means by which they advance their own agendas, religion objectifies them doubly, by first casting humanity as broken by "original sin," and then by using humanity as the "means" by which the faithful obtain their salvation.
Such an idea conjures up images from a zombie movie, as if Christians would literally crawl over mounds of people, using them as mere rungs on their spiritual ladder, just to avoid hell and reach heaven. In fact, that's exactly what we saw in Viet Nam and Cambodia, with Americans clamoring onto helicopters even as they kicked people back into the "hell" America had helped to create, and was now leaving behind.
In this way, even our most altruistic endeavors are always, at bottom, mere exercises in self interest, since religion teaches us to "love our fellow man," even if we don't really want to, because it is only by doing so that we win eternal heaven and avoid eternal hell. Who, then, without such a bribe and a threat, would bother to love anyone but themselves, in a world run by the "love of money" and an economic ethos of survival of the fittest?
In such a world, what Catholic priest would die for an atheist, were it not for the hope of heaven and the dread of hell? Would Phil Robertson ever think to die for a homosexual, for anything less than an eternal reward for doing so, and the avoidance of eternal damnation? What arch Conservatives would ever dare to forsake their own sacred political views for those evil Liberals, and what arch Liberal would ever dare to do the same for a Conservative, but for the hope of avoiding hell and winning heaven?
It is in just such a world that our morality is determined by fashioning everyone as a means to our own ends, and nothing more.
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